The present invention relates to a roof for generating electricity by solar light, which is placed on an upper portion of a house or the like and is capable of generating electric power.
There is great expectations for solar cells as a clean source of energy. Since the quantity of electric power generated by a solar cell is proportional to the area of the solar cell, a large area for placement of the solar cell is required to generate a large quantity of electric power. For such a location, it is suitable to use an upper portion of a house, especially a slant tiled roof of a house or the like having few other applications and also from the viewpoint that the roof is positioned near the point of electric power consumption.
The simplest way of placing the solar cell on the roof of a house or the like, is such that a mounting base is fixed to a roof structure member by metal fittings or the like over roof tiles and a module composed of a plurality of solar cells is set on the mount base. However, in this case, the mounting base and the module are structures independent from the roof and there arise problems that the roof is required to have great strength and the mounting base and solar cell module spoil the appearance of the house.
Thus, a solar cell tile has been developed as a substitute for the above described tile. The solar cell tile is produced by directly forming a solar cell element on a tile base material or by embedding a solar cell element on or in a tile base material.
However, such a solar cell tile has great problems in terms of practical use in that not only is it very expensive but the placement operation is very troublesome. That is, two positive and negative output terminals are provided to the respective solar cell tiles, and during the placement of the tiles, the output terminals must be suitably connected in parallel or in series to each other without interrupting the surface of the solar cell, which is an extremely troublesome wiring operation which makes the installation cost very high.